Antonio Ievolella

Ievolella’s works breath the poetics of memory, of rites, of archetypes, and invite in a timeless and universal language.
At Forte Belvedere, a theatre of history and suffering, a place of a mixture of different peoples and nations, Ievolella speaks in an extremely clear language. Two large-scale cement shields lean against the wall of the inside rooms and allude to battling: they are really “Shields”, with an archaic and highly evocative look about them, and proclaim how, over time, war can change its apparel but not its face, it can refine its techniques but maintain its own archetype. In such a context survival is what humanity mainly hopes for: it tries to protect itself, to protect its own body. Now these shields protect the memory of those fallen bodies. This is how this “creator of evocative forms” has marked the anniversary of the First World War. With distant roots in ancient and totemic forms, the exhibition ends with

a site-specific work, La pagine non scritta. This work consists of 56 iron and lead tiles that make up a large “page of life”, the life that the young soldier victims of the conflict were unable to write. Each tile is framed in dark metal and shows traces of red fabric: a small, simple army with few signs but many symbols.
War is privation, distance, fear. In the atmosphere that can still be felt in this place, Antonio Ievolella also entrusts his works with extracts from perennial everyday life, as in the sculpture Il mistero del pane. It is an epiphany of simple things that gain value and become precious precisely when we become aware of their absence. Here the sculptor, through the strength of his works, articulates the footsteps of history and the memory of them. (Arte Forte – Forte Belvedere, 2016)See biography